Global chorus of good cheer

People dressed in Santa Claus outfits at Trafalgar Square in London as part of the annual SantaCon the world over. SantaCon Halifax will start Wednesday at 8 p.m. at Grand Parade. Check out its page on Facebook. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

NEW YORK — It’s a meetup, it’s a party, it’s a spectacle: SantaCon is coming to town — in fact, to nearly 300 towns and cities around the world.

Maybe you’ve seen them in your neighbourhood: Dozens, sometimes hundreds of Santas ho, ho, ho-ing in and out of bars, stopping traffic and posing for photos. The red-suited, white-bearded revelers have gathered in Trafalgar Square in London and Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They’ve walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.

And this past weekend in Los Angeles, they visited the space shuttle en masse at the California Science Center.

“It’s innocent fun,” said Tim Mambort, 27, who’s been taking part in SantaCon in New York City for five years with friends from college. “You end up standing in a bar singing Jingle Bells with people you just met, all dressed like Santa, or walking with hundreds of Santas to Central Park, or filling up an entire subway car with Santas.”

But whether SantaCon is naughty or nice depends on whom you ask.

The website for the New York City event, planned for Dec. 15, says SantaCon “is not a bar crawl. Every time you call it that, a sugarplum fairy dies.”

But the fact is, most SantaCons involve stops at bars along a prescribed route, and over the years, there have been isolated reports of misbehaviour. In New York, police have issued summonses for violations of open container laws, and some bars refuse entry to anyone dressed in red.

Last year, residents of Lower Manhattan complained of drunken Santas vomiting and urinating in the streets.

“There was one Santa lying on the ground and I saw a father go by with two young children and the little girl said, ‘Daddy, what is wrong with Santa?’” said Community Board 1 member Paul Hovitz, who worries that the event encourages binge drinking and underage drinking.

Ian Sibley, who organizes the SantaCon.info webpage, acknowledges that “a dark shadow seems to haunt the event. So we take the extra step of emphasizing not drinking too much and perhaps supporting a good cause.”

Indeed, many SantaCons require participants to bring donations for food banks or Toys for Tots, or raise money for children’s charities or no-kill pet shelters.

Sibley started SantaCon.info five years ago with a half-dozen listings after “encountering this crazy thing with all these people dressed up like Santa” in Asheville, N.C. The website now lists nearly 275 events in 37 countries between November and January. Sibley says SantaCons have been held on every continent — from Uganda to Kathmandu to Sydney and even Antarctica — but he dates the first events to the 1990s in Copenhagen and San Francisco. He says New York is one of the biggest, drawing 20,000 Santas.

Editor’s note: The Halifax event, according to its Facebook page, will start at Grand Parade at 8 p.m. for cider and photos, then Santas are invited to a downtown pub.